Back in the Stone Age when I was young, there was a popular TV commercial for Memorex-brand cassette tapes. For those of you under the age of 40 who have no idea what a cassette tape is, go ask your uncle.

The Memorex people wanted to tell us that the quality of their recording tape was so good the average person couldn’t tell the difference between a real, live sound and sound recorded on Memorex recording tape.

Their catchy ad slogan was: “Is it live… or is it Memorex?”

According to an article I read in today’s paper, we might soon be asking a version of the same question about our next-door neighbors.

That might be stretching the point a little for the sake of argument, but it is not too far off base when it comes to the whole area of A.I., or artificial intelligence. AI is certainly not new, but it seems that the folks who have been toiling away in the AI labs around the world have been making a lot of progress lately.

Enough progress, in fact, to scare tech guru Elon Musk.

You know Elon Musk… he is the guy who can’t stop inventing stuff, from the Tesla battery-powered car to the reusable Space-X rocket to the supertrain known as the HyperLoop. You would think a guy with high tech credentials like these would be chomping at the bit to own a piece of a robot-filled future.

Instead, the Kansas City Star reports that Musk recently warned an audience that if we are not careful with AI, we might end up living in a world where the humans answer to the machines instead of the other way around.

It sounded like the world depicted in the movie I, Robot actually come to pass.

I don’t know if Mr. Musk is accurate or not, but the whole topic made me stop and think… using my genuine, authentic, grey matter human intelligence.

What is intelligence in the first place? And what makes one kind of intelligence natural and another kind artificial?

The dictionary says that anything made by human beings can be defined as artificial. Which, of course, means that this computer I am typing on, the desk that holds it up, the house I am sitting in, and the water bottle I just took a sip out of are all – technically – artificial.

Intelligence is defined as: the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.

Using those definitions, I suppose it is not impossible to see how something made by human beings could acquire and apply knowledge and skills.

Pausing for a minute and reading that last sentence again actually gave me a little shudder of dread.

I mean, yes, I would love to have my own domestic robot who could fry a perfectly over-medium egg, mow the lawn, and take the dog for a walk. But I am not at all sure I am comfortable with the idea of him (do robots have genders? Hmmmm.) acquiring his own knowledge and skills and running around applying them, willy-nilly.

I guess what I find fascinating in this whole conversation is the very thinly veiled fear that we might be entering a future filled with knowledge and technological wizardry, but utterly bereft of SOUL… for lack of a better word.

And the people who seem to be the most worried about the consequences of this soul-less future are the folks at the forefront of bringing it to us!

I think this is exactly the kind of situation that the word IRONY was invented to describe.

Intelligence is good. God did not put brains in our heads without expecting we would use them. Our intelligence is right at the forefront of reasons the psalmist says human beings are “… fearfully and wonderfully made.” (Psalm 139:14).

But intelligence without soul and without heart is just plain fearful.

YES!… We need knowledge. We need skills. We need solutions to the complex, critical issues that face the world today.

But those skills and solutions have to flow from a renewed, soft, soulful heart… the one so lovingly fashioned by our God.

You and I have a choice about the kind of future we will enjoy; will we choose the hyper-efficient, albeit soul-less one? Or will we pick a slightly wobbly and off-kilter, soulful and thoroughly human future?

I also have a very specific WAY I take my vitamins… grouping the pills by size and shape and being sure to take them between the morning showering and shaving functions. (Yes, siblings, it’s true… I am more and more becoming our father.)

So sure… go ahead and snicker at the idea of anyone being so persnickety and anal-retentive about something as trivial as VITAMINS, for crying out loud.

But as you’re sitting there laughing at my silly vitamin quirks, are you sure you don’t have a few eccentricities of your own I might get a kick out of hearing about?

The truth is, we ALL have stuff like this; whether you call it patterns, or habits, or quirks, or routines. These things serve as little anchors that give us some modest illusion of control of our lives.

The popular narrative is to accuse older folks of cornering the market on rigidity and routine. But my experience has often been just the opposite: after a certain age, people often learn the difference between the things worth hanging on to and those that aren’t. I’ve found that younger people are often much more rigid than their grandparents.

The real fun begins when any of these “anchors” are challenged by someone asking, “Why do you do it THAT way? Why not try THIS way instead?”

Suddenly our backs are up… our claws come out… we are more than willing to mount a vigorous defense of something that might not actually be worth defending.

We are seldom willing to acknowledge the reality that the person who challenges us and our patterns might actually be doing us a favor.

Routines can indeed make life manageable and sane. But they can also make it dull… predictable… lifeless… lackluster. And have you noticed… the people who make a practice of shaking things up… asking questions… challenging the status quo are usually the people with the greatest zeal for living; even if they regularly get under the skins of those of us who want to tell them to take their questions GET LOST!

When you dig into his story, you find that Jesus was a shaker-upper. Par excellence! Nothing was immune from his searching, challenging eye. No practice, no belief, no understanding, no routine, or habit was safe in his presence.

I’m sure that is why some people found his ministry liberating and life-giving while others found him to be a supreme pain in the tukhus.

I often wonder how many people – when they heard him say, “I came that they might have life and have it abundantly!” (John 10:10) – muttered quietly to themselves, “But Jesus I don’t WANT life abundantly! I want life SAFELY and PREDICTABLY!”

It’s true: when we are willing to look at one of those “anchors” in our life – whether it is a habit, a belief, or even a trivial daily routine – and examine it with fresh, questioning eyes, we are taking a chance.

We are taking the chance that life might become less stable.

But we are also taking the chance that it might become a whole lot ABUNDANTER.

It is a choice we face every day… no matter our age or station in life; will I go for predictable today, or abundant?

Wow… when you put it that way, I might even dare to start taking my vitamins ONE AT A TIME!

Now and then – if I am gone or if she really needs something washed immediately – my wife is permitted to enter the Sacred Utility Room and use those special machines. But she has to apply in writing three days in advance for the privilege.

As is true with so many things in a marriage, this division of labor is accepted protocol… it’s just “the way things are” in our household.

And so recently, when the nine-year-old son of a friend of ours asked WHY I do the laundry, I found myself momentarily speechless… caught without an answer.

It was an innocent question… posed as we were all just shooting the breeze and eating hot dogs at the friend’s birthday party. Somehow the conversation drifted to household chores and my wife said, “Well, Russell always does the laundry at our house,” which prompted the young man to turn toward me, cock his head, and ask, “Why?”

And for the next few minutes, I just stuttered and stammered and said a bunch of stuff that fully demonstrated my lack of preparation for that question.

Long after the party ended and we arrived back home, I continued gnawing on that innocent, yet puzzling question: OK… why is that? Why DO I insist on doing the laundry?

And then it came to me…

Besides the purely practical fact that I regularly need clean socks or underwear, I realized: when I do the laundry, I get to see actual RESULTS!

It’s beautiful! You start off with a pile of dirty, wrinkled clothes… and then, a few hours later, after following some strictly prescribed steps: VIOLA! … you have before you neatly folded piles of CLEAN clothes!

SO gratifying!… and so very, very different from my work as a pastor.

Don’t get me wrong… I LOVE being a pastor. I love just about every part of it. But do not imagine for a moment that pastoring is work that affords a person the opportunity to see very many tangible results of their labor.

There are no proud piles of clean clothes at the end of the day… no newly constructed homes or roadways… no wiser, more knowledgeable students… no fresh coats of paint or scores of music or stacks of firewood to point to and say, “SEE! I did that!!”

Mind you, there are lots of things pastors LIKE to point to and say, “SEE! Look at that! I did that!” Things like increased worship attendance… more young people and children attending church… a new or remodeled building… more members… higher levels of giving… greater missional outreach to the community, for example.

It’s an understandable aspiration. Most people like to feel as if their efforts have made a difference somehow… that they have produced visible results.

It is hard to accept the fact that results are often out of our hands… sometimes occurring in spite of us… or even completely apart from our efforts.

We have a hard time accepting the fact that “results” – in the wild world of ministry – are actually in the hands of Someone Else… specifically the One we profess to serve.

It made me stop and realize that my call is a call to faithfulness. Not necessarily results. As Jesus said to his disciples in Luke 16:10 – “Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much…”

That’s because most of the time, when I find myself looking for the results of my efforts, I realize that I am turning around and looking behind me. When my priorities turn to FAITHFULNESS, I am then looking FORWARD… to the next right step I need to take.

So I will keep washing and folding those clothes, mowing that grass and pulling weeds out of that vegetable garden and get my “results itch” scratched there.

Today, I will remind myself to continue to look forward… be faithful… and to remember that the results belong to God and not to me…

For the most part when we talk about freedom, we mean political freedom:

We mean the ability to freely and democratically elect our leaders without pressure or fear of reprisal.

We mean the ability to freely speak our minds about the state of our country and her leaders… even if that speech is critical.

We mean the ability to travel from one place to another without restriction.

We mean the ability to worship – or not worship – in the style we choose.

These freedoms are precious and fragile and TOTAL. Citizens of the United States are blessed to enjoy 100% of each of these freedoms. They have been obtained by the willing sacrifice of women and men throughout our country’s history. We should never come to take them as entitlements or guarantees, but rather be grateful for them on each of the other 364 days of the year.

And yet, as I use this time off to reflect on the topic of freedom, I realize there are freedoms in my life besides political freedoms. True, these are not the freedoms we typically celebrate on the Fourth of July, but they are certainly worth pondering.

There is our mental/emotional freedom. Or another way to describe it is freedom from fear, anxiety, resentment, and anger.

There is freedom from compulsion. Can any of us truly say we are completely liberated from those nagging little (or sometimes not so little) habits that show up over and over again?

There is economic freedom… or more accurately the freedom from worry about how we will eat, clothe, shelter, or support ourselves.

Finally there is spiritual freedom… also known as “… the peace that surpasses all understanding.” (Phil. 4:7, NRSV). The freedom from the forces of darkness and despair.

I count this freedom as the greatest – and also the most accessible – freedom of all. This is the freedom that prompted Christian mystic Julian of Norwich to say, “All shall be well. All manner of things shall be well,” and Horatio Spafford to pen the words to the hymn, It Is Well with My Soul in 1873.

A long time ago we decided that it was fitting and proper to set aside a day of national celebration in honor of our political freedoms. It is good that we routinely remind ourselves of their preciousness and importance… and of the sacrifices made by countless men and women to obtain them.

Somehow I have not figured out the connection between overeating, amateur incendiary devices and political freedom, but who am I to argue?

But today I wonder… how and when will I celebrate those other freedoms? How will I – or any of us – choose to express an appropriate level of gratitude for the spiritual freedom Christ died to give us? How will we choose to make a point of setting aside time and space to say, “Thank you, Jesus!” for breaking the chains of sin and death?

Paul reminded us in Galatians 5:1 that FREEDOM was at the very heart of Jesus’ mission when he said, “For freedomChrist has set us free. Stand firm, therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery.” (Gal. 5:1, NRSV).

So yes… get out and gather with friends and family today. Shoot off some firecrackers… grill some hot dogs, crank some homemade ice cream and splash around in the pool (weather permitting).

But don’t forget to spend part of the day on your knees giving thanks for ALL of the freedoms you enjoy.